AS THE WORLD TURNS.

It takes forty-eight hours for a calendar day to be ticked off all the world's calendar pages, from 12.01 am immediately west of the International Date Line to 11.59 pm immediately east of that line.  The Santa Tracker we hear about at Christmas only has to be active for twenty-four hours, as Santa is delivering those toys in the midnight hours of each time zone.

Historian Stanley Weintraub uses that concept, and borrows from Eugene O'Neill to create Long Day's Journey into War: December 7, 1941.  Yes, Book Review N^o. 9 might have better been offered yesterday, but per his logic, it was already December 8 in Tokyo when the first air strikes reached Oahu.

As December 7 began on Wake Island, it was still late Saturday evening in Tokyo, midafternoon in Moscow, and 2.30 am at Pearl Harbor.  Yes, there were stirrings in Washington, London, and Berlin about something up with the Japanese, but the Germans were coming to terms with their failure to invest Moscow in the fall.  And so it goes as the world turned, the profound and earnest stuff of military logistics and diplomacy, and the human stories of privation in the lands under German occupation or radio stations signing off in Occupied Yugoslavia signalling the end of the day to British troops in Egypt.

Come noon of December 7 in London, it's 1.30 am at Pearl Harbor, still very much a peacetime Saturday evening winding down in Honolulu.  There are a few unexpected events in the waters around Oahu, but the main event does not begin until noon of December 7 in Chicago, but whatever the Packers or Bears were up to that day did not figure in his narrative.

Much of the most interesting reading is what happens as news of the raid reaches British and United States forces in Singapore and the Philippines.  Much of that is disquieting, as preparation by field commanders was slow, and the bombers came with daylight on the 8th.  Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, though?  According to Mr Weintraub, his diary entry had nothing about sleeping giants, rather reading "What I have achieved/Is far from a grand slam,/Let me in all modesty declare./It is more like/A redoubled bid just made."  It might not have even been a game bid: the raid did not account for any aircraft carriers, and Mr Weintraub suggests the failure to secure Midway as part of the first sortie might have made the May 1942 operation "inevitable."

As we reach midnight in Chicago, Japanese designs on the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore become evident.  Domestic reprisals against Japanese nationals in the United States also occur, with Woody Guthrie figuring in an early citizen action to protect a California saloon with a Japanese owner.  And as December 7 runs into the International Date Line from the east, German intelligence is figuring out that the Soviets have reinforced Moscow with units that had been assigned to the Soviet Far East.

What began that day unfolded for the next nearly four years.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)